


In Darkness, The Blind Man Is King (But The Guy With The Blaster Is Pretty Damn Handy Too)

by RyuuzaKochou



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Action/Adventure, All The Meetings In Between, Baze Is A BAMF, Chirrut Is a Snarky Cinnamon Roll, First Meetings, Get Together, Humor, Last Meetings, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Romance, They're Really Sweet Together, eventually, stay together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-13 10:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9119257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyuuzaKochou/pseuds/RyuuzaKochou
Summary: Here’s how they tell the story later in their lives. We came together because the Senior Abbot was an asshole.All is as the Force wills it, Chirrut would intone to the ceremonial Rolling Of The Eyes performed by Grandmaster Eye-roller Baze. Even an asshole like him could perform a useful and vital function in the Force.Still...He really was an asshole.Chirrut thanks the Force. Baze thanks whoever is listening.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> You know what? I don't even know. Saw the movie, loved the movie, hated the movie because I loved the characters so, so much and it was all just so sad at the end. I have a plot outline going but I'm still feeling my way through this one. 
> 
> But I really did love the idea of these two gentlemen being super-duper crazy ass long term married romantic soulmates and their no doubt unbe-freakin-lievable escapades. So, uh, here we are. If you spot any humour along the way, it's just a coincidence. I'm not that clever.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own the work and don't make profit off this work. Jesus Christ, are you kidding me? If I owned them, they would have lived!

Prologues: Long and Rambling Primers In Life

 

Chirrut Imwe was not a force of nature; in fact, he’d probably laugh at being named so. A force of nature invariably acts in opposition to the usual flow of nature and Chirrut was no such fool. How could he be? One doesn’t not fight blindness; one can only move in the direction it forces.

For Baze Malbus’ money, Chirrut’s power was a far more astonishing – and insidious. He was walking disproof of the law of diminishing returns.

Not even the Jedi can manage that.

Here’s how they tell the story later in their lives. _We came together because the Senior Abbot was an asshole._

 _Do not disparage an asshole, my friend_ , Chirrut would interject cheerfully. _An anal orifice provides a useful and vital function._

 _Not the way_ he _did it,_ would be Baze’s amicable retort.

 _All is as the Force wills it_ , Chirrut would intone to the ceremonial Rolling Of The Eyes performed by Grandmaster Eye-roller Baze. _Even an asshole like him could perform a useful and vital function in the Force._

Baze would nod to this; he wasn’t the kind of man who argued with results.

Still...

He really was an asshole.

Chirrut thanks the Force. Baze thanks whoever is listening.

\------------------------------------------------------------

Every member of the Temple of the Whills wore the same robes. Everyone, from the highest senior cleric to the lowliest lay hall sweeper wore exactly the same, with no rank insignia of any kind.

Supposedly – from what Baze remembered – they all wore the same to demonstrate their belief that all beings are the same to the Force; no one being is less or more important than the other. The Force does not recognise rank so, indeed, why should we?

It looked pretty on paper but was a great big pile of steaming bantha dung in real life. It was a truth universally acknowledged that the instant a batch of sentient beings gathered together for a common cause, some idiot would start drawing a pyramid chart somewhere; usually with said idiot on top. People liked order; and no matter how much the democratically inclined protested it, the fastest and cheapest route to order was hierarchy.

Practically, the uniform couture had the effect of a herd of t’janak; pressed together they were a mass of the like-colours, impossible to pick loose into individuals. It also, cunningly, made it more difficult to separate the senior officials from the layspeakers.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Baze’s sighed inwardly as he watched the other members of the ops team skim the senior clerics from the assorted others in the entourage, deaf to the protests that ensued. It had been a long day and the back of his head was buzzing like an overstressed engine.

“They’re whiny for priests,” Keets commented idly as she spun her blaster. “I thought they were all, y’know, peace and quiet types.”

Baze almost told her to stop that; it wore out the trigger mechanism and rattled the focusing matrices loose. He didn’t, though. He hadn’t been with the crew long enough to show that level of familiarity and Keets wasn’t looking for a mentor.  He shrugged instead. “Peaceful, maybe. Quiet, not so much. Not from what I remember.”

“Oh, yeah,” Keets blinked. “I keep forgettin’. You’re from their parts.”

Baze shrugged again. “Once. Years ago. A...” _A decade, at least_ , he realised with a blink. Maybe that was what was so jarring about this. He hadn’t seen those robes in such a long time the memories had faded into a near murk. Their return was a far sharper jab that he had braced for.

Keets lips curled into a sneer as robed clerics in various states of outrage or anxiety were marched past them onto their ship. Left behind, the support staff, crew and patchwork refugees huddled, owl eyed and silent. “What a pack of losers. They carry the most powerful stones in the galaxy and then act all surprised when people get violent to get at ‘em, and _then_ they turn around and pretend like that knew it was going to happen all along. _All is as the Force wills it_ ,” she fluted sarcastically. “Brain-rot con artists.”

“They aren’t con artists,” Baze retorted far more sharply than he intended. “They believe in what they say.”

Keets lifted a truly impressive eyebrow. “Wow. You were really indoctrinated on Jedha, weren’t you?”

Baze held her gaze until the eyebrow dropped back down. “Not indoctrinated. I don’t believe what they believe. I lived with them. I know how they think.”

“Huh,” she seemed sceptical. “Well, which one of them is most likely to spill, then?”

Baze didn’t let his expression change. “Does it matter?” He already didn’t like this. His head still buzzed like in hadn’t in...a while.

Curse this stupid crew. He’d joined the motley bunch after his last militia contract had expired without payment as promised, leaving him high and dry and short on funds to travel to more lucrative markets of employment. This group were semi-legit contracted privateers nominally under the auspices of the Kaafee monarchy, retained to patrol borders and dabble in some shadow work on behalf of a distant planet Baze had never actually been on. A year stint hadn’t seemed like the worse choice between that and starving and, better still, payment had been guaranteed and was still deposited monthly. He had enough now that he could jump ship the very day his contract was up and go wherever he wanted to be. The crew weren’t bad – loner soldiers of fortune with varying levels of skill mostly, the ship was average but maintained and the work mostly dull couriering and occasional bodyguard jobs for officials in between patrol sweeps. Really, Baze’s biggest threat was death by boredom.

Only one thing irked to the bone – the captain. Captain D’ahman, he of the obnoxiously piping voice and an infuriating habit of springing surprises on them when it was too late to turn back. _Hey, we’ve just arrived at port but it turns out we’ve been ordered to pick up seventeen canisters of volatile phoscretin so no shore leave. Hey, I know we thought we were doing a patrol but it turns out we need to deliver the hostages in the cargo hold back to their home moon in enemy territory._

_Hey, I know I said we were going on a supply run but orders change. We have to hijack a runner boat from Jedha to find out where their latest shipment of Kybers went._

Baze’s career had been chequered and definitely not on the righteous side of illegal but he liked to think that he hadn’t slipped from skilled assassin to low level thug without noticing. It was a dark and misshapen thing, but he did, in fact, have his pride.

“Not for long,” Keets gave a bloodthirsty grin.

Baze grimaced. His conscience already had its dander up. He had a bad feeling he was going to have to...sigh, _do_ something about this. He rubbed the back of his skull, willing the buzzing to stop long enough for him to think straight.

And then his odds, already at a low ebb, sank like a stone.

A familiar voice rang out. “ _Sandlark_?”

If such a reflex hadn’t long been beaten out of him, Baze would have hit the roof. A familiar figure in robes was rising from the midst of the refugees.

Baze’s jaw dropped open. “ _Graceling_?”

 _Surely_ the day was looking up from here. It _had_ to. It sure as hellshaft couldn’t get any damn lower.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------

Where did it start? Where does _anything_ start? Chirrut would say something that wavered between profound and profoundly trite; that within the Force past, present and future all waltzed and spun together so beginnings were everywhere and nowhere. Baze would shrug. For him, it started with a voice in the dark.

Always, a voice in the dark.

\------------------------------------------------------------------

The thread of Baze’s life was unremarkable enough until that point; and like most vital turns in history, it only developed meaning long after it had passed.

Baze had been born on Jedha the son of the son of the son of the son of pilgrims, as all the ‘natives’ were. No peoples evolved there and none lived there at all for centuries. A handful of stalwarts had set up shop on the cold, barely habitable moon aeons in the past for what minerals it might possess.  Not until the rise of the Jedi and, invariably, the rise of the lightsaber (and, indeed, the age of the blaster, too), had Jedha and its holy city risen to its peak. It had been one of the first Jedi Temples and centres of Force worship; Kyber crystals turned the Force from a hoped-for intangible into something you could grasp in a hand, something that could be measured with a machine, that was repeatable. Faith crystallised, made real. People of all stripes had flocked there before improving hyperspace technology and changing eras had more or less wiped it from the map. But, while not at its long passed peak since the Jedi had left for more central pastures, it eked out a respectable living still, from mining and from religious pilgrimage. The two went together rather well. Just like in foxholes, atheism was a hard concept to grasp when one is alone down a pitch dark hole, miles from daylight.

Baze had been the son born of the _yahvasudra_ , the caste of miners who worked in the caverns that stretched miles in all directions under the mesa that was NiJedha. Not members of the temple per se, they had a symbiotic relationship with the clergy caste, the _rishisudra_. They mined the uncut crystals for the temples artisans to cut and facet – temple artisans were some of the last people able to perform such a skill on the tricky stones – and maintained the engines and equipment needed to do so. In return they were regularly paid, housed and clothed and their children were educated for free at the temple proper – no shabby perk, as the standard of education there was reasonably high.

So there it was. It was not a rich life, nor an easygoing one. Mining was as mining is everywhere; backbreaking, demanding and dangerous to the health. But it wasn’t an austere one either, and certainly not riddled with hardship. Young Baze had gone to school every day, hadn’t gone hungry or cold and had a father to admire when he came back at the end of his long shift, muscles bulging with years of physical work but still with enough energy to wink at his son and sneak out into the dunes at the edge of the settlement where they secretly made homemade blasters with crystal chips that Malbus senior had brought home. They snuck out to avoid outraged shrieks from his mother, but considering the fact that after the lambasting they’d received when she did find out she’d then sniffily corrected the design flaws in the barrel reloader and then had proceeded to teach her son the two-three-two pattern double-blaster cover fire technique _properly_ , well, really, she couldn’t have minded that much.

She had a past. It was hardly newsworthy on Jedha. There were plenty of people with every good reason to drop off the edge of the Rim, and Jedha wasn’t the worst place to do it.

To help the family Baze had started running with the other gangs of _yahvasudra_ children, carving out a subsistence by running errands and sorting through scree and spoil from the mines for any speck of precious crystal missed by the equipment or droids. It happened. Kybers had strange effects on technology, which is why the work was still done by the hands of people still. All around the works children ran and played, barefoot and fearless, darting in out of hoverhoppers and magcarts, relaying messages, carrying meals and spare equipment for the miners, begging for a chance to use the cutting laser – _please!_ The miners would call them sandlarks with gruff affection, because they flocked like the little double-winged birds that lived off the witchy-worms and whatever else they could scrounge from the dunes.

They weren’t... believers, exactly, but they had great respect for the clergy and would listen to the teachings. There were school trips and festival days, Baze grew into his body following his father’s broad shoulders down into the mines, going deeper as he got older, learning the trade by doing. He didn’t want to be a miner like his father; he wanted to join the Temple, become a Guardian. They wouldn’t let him apply until he was of age, so until then he used his time wisely and developed his skill set and his strength with honest work. Plenty of Guardians had started the same way.

He hadn’t really been aware of Chirrut personally. People never think about it, but the Temple was big – a huge place, where thousands came and went every day. It was very easy for two people – even those who lived and worked there – to miss each other for a long time.

Chirrut’s trajectory into the Temple was a fair bit less gentle. The son of first generation pilgrims, he had lost his parents and his sight to the Miasma, the general name for a host of infectious diseases that were carried into the city by millions of yearly visiting pilgrims. They were supposed to be treated with panimmunity planet side of NaJedha or at the linetop stations hovering in orbit but there were always so many coming in and the ferrymen were not always scrupulous when there was a profit to be made. What did they care if some ague swept its way through the densely packed crowds, biting down on the young and old with unforgiving teeth? There were more pilgrims coming to fill the gaps.

Worse, their caution may not even matter; one minor strain could shake hands with some other minor strain, and suddenly there was a major problem sweeping the streets, vectors going in every direction. Miasmas were a fact of life; almost a season in their own right. Enough money and time would render the problem negligible, but Jedha was long past its heyday and the credits just weren’t there anymore.

A young Chirrut had woken one day to a dark and lonely world, as alien to him as a distant star he could no longer see. His mother’s brother had taken the young and crippled child into his household on sufferance. An impractical dreamer of a man, he had uprooted his family and extended family to find a meaningful life of purity on Jedha, and had found to his dismay that austerity really was very close to poverty and poverty was not that man’s goal in life. Wife and children all complaining mightily about everything from the food to the climate to the bewildering lifestyles of the temple folk, Chirrut’s Uncle had become disillusioned about his dream when faced with the reality of it, as he usually did. He’d been ready to pack up and blaze away from this dusty moon when the Miasma had swept through, leaving him without an extended family and the income they provided, and a damaged child he had no time for. He hadn’t been that close to his sister in life and felt no real kinship with the boy.

For one wretched year they’d all tried to make the best of it. Chirrut had tried to heal and adapt as best he could with what could only be described as indifferent assistance from his only living kin. It was this year that he had the value of self reliance etched into his bones. Eventually, though, the Miasma, which never really leaves the system, relapsed in him and his Uncle had decided he’d had enough. Taking on a blind burden was bad enough – there was sympathy from the neighbours to be had. Taking on an _infectious_ one – which Chirrut wasn’t, actually – was not to be borne.

Luckily, there was a solution to this problem.

For centuries, there had been a tradition of leaving children to be cared for by the Temple. The Council tried to discourage the practice – after all, it wasn’t an orphanage, it was a mining concern wearing the clothes of a not-for-profit organisation. However, the practice dated all the way back to the Jedi and some scholars thought it was probably the birthplace of the tradition of taking in disciples very young and with no connections to the outside. Many cherished a hope in that leaving their children at the Temple meant they would end up in the hands of the Jedi which was a mightily respectable profession then and really, it wasn’t quite the forlorn hope it sounded. The Temple of the Whills still had many dealings with the Temple on Coruscant, Jedi often made pilgrimages to the Temple too, so a child around the Temple had a pretty fair chance of being spotted by a passing Jedi – much higher than a random chance they might be found elsewhere. Faced with centuries of precedent in tradition and a system that was proven to work, the Temple of the Whills had given up fighting the inevitable. Children would be left. They put systems in place to deal with them. Mostly the children were taken in by local families or ferried to NaJedha to be absorbed by the orphanages there because, really, tradition aside the Temple still wasn’t an orphanage. There were exceptions, though.

The first were babies and toddlers left on the steps – specifically the ones with a high midichlorian count. The Temple clerics were sensible about this sort of thing – being known as a source of recruits for the Jedi did no harm and generated plenty of good for all concerned. They were kept and tested, cared for and educated. If they were lucky, the Jedi would deem them acceptable and they would find their place out in the stars, or, if not they would become the next generation of preachers, clerics and staff serving the Temple, which was a satisfactory arrangement for all. They called this type the foundlings.

The second type demonstrated their less sensible and more devout mindset. Sometimes children were left that were... different. Sometimes disabled, sometimes diseased with no hope of a cure, sometimes suffering from a birth defect or deformity, conjoined twins, albinos, autistics and more. The Temple would often take in these oddballs and misfits. The Force, they said, moved in mysterious ripples around such people. The Temple priests were nothing if not fascinated by the myriad of small ways the Force interacted with the universe at large.

And besides, Force oddities aside, there weren’t very many other places for these children to go that wasn’t an institution and compassion was a cornerstone of a Force-believer’s faith. The children would be taken in, would get whatever help could be given, get an education and a stable home in the Temple. They would find a niche in a sheltered space where they could function and thrive. It wasn’t the worst destiny, not by a long shot.

When Chirrut’s Uncle stole into the Temple in the dead of night and dumped the boy on a handy altar where he would be found on the morrow, half dead and hallucinating with fever while his Uncle patted his own back on the shuttle leaving Jedha, fully satisfied he had done all that was required of him for the boy, Chirrut became one of these.

They called them gracelings.

So here they were. Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, two native sons of Jedha in orbit around the Temple of the Whills and all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Two ships about to pass in a _very_ dark night.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------


	2. Chapter One: Statistically, Your Day Can Get Worse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To get to the present, we go back to the beginning. Chirrut wasn't exactly a golden boy as a kid. Baze deals with his shifting chances and some shifting sands - literally.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have SO MANY HEADCANONS about Jedha and the Temple culture right now; I'm wasting a lot of time in this chapter trying to explain them. They will no doubt be proven entirely wrong when someone fills in a wikia somewhere. I haven't read the novel even. Eh. If I was worried about the ripples in the Force caused by AU's, I sure as hell wouldn't enjoy fanfiction so much.
> 
> Disclaimer: The Star Wars universe and all things therein do not belong to me, nor do I, sigh, make any money off them.

Chapter One: Statistically, Your Day Can Get Worse

 

Things had happened. They had disengaged from the boarded runner boat; the people left behind were all fine and they should be able to limp back to the routing station they’d come from. This wasn’t compassion so much as expedience. Every hostage was an tax on available resources, so they had to be choosy about who got on. Also, they _were_ semi-legit. The Kaafee Royals would just as soon avoid having to explain to any senate hearing about how privateers in their name had murdered a bunch of pacifists and refugees in the name of expediency.

Legitimacy was occasionally a useful attribute, it seems.

“So, you know them.”

Baze gave that statement the contempt it deserved. “My birth planet is hardly news.”

Inwardly he was groaning at himself. Fifteen years of carefully and lovingly cultivated control of his facial expressions down the waste chute and out into the vacuum of space in one fell swoop. His old teachers must be shrieking on the winds of lament at the waste of their teachings. The graceling had always had that effect on him.

Really, only about twelve percent of his total attention was on Captain Smarm and his transparent attempts to hook his mouth for reel in. The rest of his mind was speeding at hyperspace, trying to calculate angles and odds of getting the senior clergy off this bucket alive, himself off alive, taking his accrued pay with him, who he would likely have to kill to get there and _what the actual kriffing fuckity fuck was_ he _doing off Jedha and in the wide, cruel,_ dangerous _universe_?

His twelve percent scan on the Captain logged a pertinent detail and had him re-prioritise his focus.

D’ahman had actually lapsed into expectant silence but Baze had been trained by _monks_. You haven’t mastered silence until you’ve mastered Temple silence, until you’ve mastered _mine_ silence, down in the deep black with a tide of blood roaring in your ears, it’s so quiet. Baze waited like he was prepared to wait until the universe ended.

He was amused to see D’ahman’s face flush up as it got under his skin. D’ahman had some Kuhat somewhere up his family tree, but only enough to show when he was stressed. He flushed a faint bluish purple. “Malbus,” he growled. “Will they talk to you or not?”

Baze held the silence a beat longer than necessary. “That depends on what I’m asking. And _why_.”

He waited his infuriating wait.

D’ahman sighed. “I am the Captain of the ship. Does anyone here remember that?”

“When Senate forces come down on us for waylaying a legally travelling Jedha shuttle, I doubt whether they will notice your rank either, sir,” Baze replied blandly, just to see him go a bit more purple. It really was bizarre to watch.

“They wouldn’t do that? Would they?” the first mate whose name no one could pronounce, piped up worriedly.

“Kybers are class A, maximum protected commodity,” their quartermaster growled softly. “Trafficking in them is a death sentence anywhere the Senate is and most places they aren’t ‘cause if the Senate can’t get to you, the Jedi _will_.”

 There were some murmurs to this. The crew was – to the last man, woman and assorted others – survivors. They had all learned which fights not to pick and had the scars to mark the lessons.

“We aren’t _trafficking_ in them,” D’ahman burst out to the rising tide of disapproving murmurs in the bridge. “A shipment of Kybers was sold to the Kaafee; they were paid for – legally! Only they were never delivered. The Royal Court asked us to recover their property, that’s all.”

“Recovering property? Are you mad?” Jacxxon, one of their gunners slash document forgers exclaimed. “It was a _refugee_ transport. They’ll never swallow it!”

“Everybody knows those damn Jedi-lites use the refugee organisation stuff as cover for Kyber shipping,” D’ahman snorted.

Baze never blinked, but he did inwardly note that not everyone knew any such thing. He certainly hadn’t.

“Look, we have our orders from the people who are paying us,” D’ahman raised his hands for peace. “We just need the drop off point they dumped their Kybers at before collecting the refugees. We collect the rocks, drop this batch of holy madmen off at the nearest routing station and deliver the Kybers to the Kaafee Royals, yes? Then all the politician can all bray at each other in the galactic senate over who should have custody and how. They won’t care about us, I guarantee it. _If,_ ” he glared pointedly at Baze, who was having more sinking feelings than a colander at sea. “If we can get them to talk fast enough.”

The crew all looked at him, hope of avoiding the gaze of the establishment and all the pesky laws and arrest warrants therein, in their eyes.

“Well, Malbus?” Keets asked archly. “That weird ass blind man seemed to know you awful well. Would he talk, do you think?”

“Because if he won’t, we’re going to have to... make one of them do so,” D’ahman added.

Baze sighed. Well... _shit_. “They’ll talk.” He promised. “But they’re not big on outsiders. The caste system is a big deal for them. I a-... was _kshetrapalakasudra_. They might speak to me if I’m alone with them.”

“Kshet-whatsis?” Keets blinked.

“Guardian _,”_ Baze rumbled heavily, inviting no further questions

\-----------------------------------------------

This was how Baze gained his faith.

When he was seven, he fell down an old mineshaft. It wasn’t deep enough to be a disaster, merely a misadventure. The old mesas and dunes were riddled with them, centuries of mining had turned the moon into a termite hill with uncountable tiny pinpricks of old holes stabbed all across its surface. Indeed, the miners all reckoned there were more streets beneath NiJedha and the handful of other towns that there ever was or would be above it. They always warned children to be careful to stay on paths they knew were safe, because those long forgotten shafts were ever swallowed and unmasked by the shifting sands, but it was impossible to map them, nor know when ones had been infested by an opportunistic sarlacc until one is, in fact, in it’s mouth.

But, as always throughout history, children were children. Baze counted himself among the lucky that day when the ground gave way and dumped him into the dark from only a mildly bruising height. He didn’t panic; the procedure had been hammered in ruthlessly by his mother on what to do when he inevitably found himself here.

First, he dug out his comm; no good, really, from this depth. They didn’t have an underground line broadcast system in the Kyber mines. Uncut Kybers resonated; they interfered with signals, with electrical fields and magnetic fields too.  He aligned it with the hole he’d made in the ceiling and set the emergency pulse going. It wouldn’t reach anything yet by eventually a satellite overhead would meander in it’s orbit over the hole and pick up a distress call.

 _Then_ he slapped on his sand visor and face mask – Kyber dust was pretty stuff, they used it in ceremonies at the Temple using the runoff from the artisans quarter – but it could also be a vicious and merciless killer if you breathed in too much of it over too long a time. It would shred your lungs with a billon tiny spears, escape into the pleura and out into the bloodstream where the tiny, microscopic little grinders would proceeded to slowly sand your organs down to mincemeat and gristle while you hacked up pieces of your lungs and sliced your throat to ribbons in doing so. Maybe, if you were lucky, the grains would defy the blood brain barrier and get into the cortices in the temple of your skull, where the subsequent electrical charges in your synapses would turn your brain into a crude, glittery, fleshy lightsaber; sparking and buzzing as they focused the energy like a billion tiny lenses. You’d still die, of course, but your death would be full of hallucinations and visions, while every single nerve in your body overloaded like you were being electrocuted and you broke bones spasming on the floor. A true religious experience, that death.

Baze was a long way from any of the current, active tunnels, but that didn’t matter. If there was mining, there was dust. It’s not like a Kyber would ever break down, so the dust thrown up by a long dead crew could still be in these tunnels, impossible to tell apart from everyday sand at a glance. They had the great fanworks and magfilters anywhere there were people, but that system wouldn’t affect a tunnel so far off the beaten track.

 _Then_ , well, here was where the education from his mother and father deviated in two different directions. His father was a man of the community; raised in a place where words like neighbour, friend and co-worker always meant the same as ‘family’. He always told Baze to stay put when he’d fallen in. Someone would come for him. That was how the _yahvasudra_ worked; they all pitched in, they all helped each other out. Trust in that was the world he knew.

His mother on the other hand was a scarred and battered loner, far too accustomed to the need for absolute and total self-reliance. You get in, she said, you get yourself out. It’s the only principle you can stand on and survive all. So he’d been drilled until he’d cried in mine sign, the ancient miners shorthand carved into walls, unchanged for centuries. They would help him find his way to active shafts, to people.

He’d wavered, but eventually he’d trudged into the dark – carefully leaving his own trail of mine sign with his tiny knife. Thankfully he was still in the shallow end of the mines, which was just compressed sandstone – it all but crumbled with a look. If he’d been deep in the heart of the crystal mines the rock wouldn’t bend to the will of anything less than a laser. His father would shake his head and chide him, but he’d never be able to look his mother in the face if he sat and waited. She didn’t believe in that sort of thing.

Onwards he went; feeling his way. The children of miners started young and grew up fast as they were exposed to work early. On top of that he was his mother’s son – it just wasn’t in him to panic, or even to hesitate. The pitch dark of the mines didn’t scare him. The mine sign marks were reassuring little notches and lines under his fingertips. He knew the way to the nearest rest station – long unused – the nearest air vents – probably choked in sand now – how deep he was, the clicks to the next nexus link which would join one main shaft to another until they all ran together to the main line and then how many clicks to the Temple. All the shafts ended at the Temple, even the most ancient. It’d be a hike from this far out, but even in the pitch dark he knew it was there.

Eventually he became aware of the humming. It was so low that much time had passed before he’d consciously noticed it. It was a low, warm buzz the started from the back of his head a crept around his skull like soft pins and needles. The dry smell of the earth was salty and mouth-watering. The hum flooded down his spine, into his fingers and toes, into his heart and gut, until he was buzzing alive with it.

Without being fully aware of it he went off the straight road to the Temple and into a lost tributary, where the mine sign became scarce and the shaft tilted downward, deeper into silence. Whole body thrumming, he was still able to sense his way somehow. The sound of his heartbeat was so loud but so steady he imagined he could hear it echoing up and down the tunnels, marking his way like a sonar relief map. He followed the hum has it built to a crescendo, like something was calling his through his bones. He unerring and stubbornly dug and bulled his way through ancient scree that marked a cave in, though centuries of shifting, sinking and settling and degraded what was probably once an impenetrable blockage.

He wormed through the tightest squeeze yet and into the echoing chamber beyond. He didn’t even know how far beneath the surface he was right now, he’d stopped reading the mine signs long ago. He didn’t know why. Father and mother both would have shook him for doing something this stupid.

He all but fell into the room beyond; it was full of broken echoes. It was full of _something_. He sat in the dark, feeling alive with the humming. Baze reached for his pack, containing the loot he’d collected. After all, that was why he’s been out there. The latest windstorm had scoured the dunes below the mesa and all the other sandlarks had been in raptures about the ancient machine dump it had uncovered like a shipwreck. To the jaundiced eyes of adults it was half rusted old junk long past use, but to the children and scavengers it was a pile of treasure waiting to be inventoried. His father had promised him they’d go on his rest day but Baze had been mad with impatience. Another storm could wash the whole lot back under the sand ocean in a flash. He was in an agony of dismay over missing out and had given up trying to wait halfway through the school day.

He maintained – and would maintain for many years after – that it was worth it. He found some barely damaged matrices and some old but usable chips and pneumatic joints for the droids and, the prize of his collection, a laser generator from an old cutting machine. He’d spent the extra time sitting in the sand wiring it to his school datapad, the only thing he had the carried the necessary charge. Nothing was better yet than the gratified feeling he got when that dull old thing had suddenly come to life in his hands. He couldn’t see the laser because the laser was invisible straight out of the generator but he’d felt that machine thrum with a heartbeat nonetheless.

He dug it out of his pack now. Grinning unstoppably, he fumbled with the jury rigged switches in the dark and eventually managed to tap the right two wires together.

The effect was blindingly bright at first. Baze blinked and scrubbed his watery eyes for a while as his eyes adjusted. But then...oh. The laser hit the Kybers. They were piled in rough heaps in the chamber, the crates they were once held in rotted and rusted away from centuries. The Kybers were pristine though. Uncut, they dispersed the laser light rather than focused it but every colour imaginable fanned out, up and around. The air was made of rainbows.

That’s how they found him, hour upon hour later. Staring unblinkingly and the mass of spinning colours, motes of light of Kyber dust glittering on the edges. He was in a trance, completely unresponsive until they hauled.

“Papa,” he’d croaked, throat dryer than dry. “Papa, I think I saw the Force.”

For years afterwards he’d believe that not only had he seen it, but had been led there by the Force. He described the thrum he’d felt, that had built and built the closer he came to the lost Kybers. His father had ruffled his hair; after shaking him for being foolish his father had forgiven him. Baze had unwittingly stumbled onto an old Kyber store room completely forgotten in the wake of an ancient mining disaster. They’d been rewarded for the find, which was nice.

“Perhaps so,” his father had said.

His mother had said nothing; just pursed her lips. Baze had figured at the that she’d still been a little mad at him for being stupid enough to get lost, but that was her way. She was glad of the extra credits and had hugged him in the hospital they’d taken him to afterward, which had been an unusual move for her. Baze was still turning the laser generator over in his hands, grinning unstoppably. He never saw his father gently shake his head at his mother over his head. She had rolled her eyes, but kept silent.

His faith had persisted until Baze was fifteen, and he went down into the working mines proper for the first time. When he came back up, he was flat on his back in the hospital for a week later, with some new home truths to ponder.

He never looked at the Force quite the same way after that.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is how Chirrut built his faith.

Chirrut didn’t come in peace. He didn’t come heart humming and wide eyed and ready to believe. Chirrut’s outlook was as black as his sight.

Which would have been _fine_ , really, except that he wasn’t the sort to mope through his sadness. Not after the year he’d just had with the family who had left him to die. He’d been scraped to rawbones, whatever was left after the devastation of his missing parents had been stretched out and flayed to scraps by their indifference to his wellbeing or dignity. Worse, the boy had found his Uncle an intimidating man and the memory of his cowardice was like sand under his skin.

Chirrut Imwe was a raging ball of bitter spitfire, even in recovery.

They assigned him a droid assistant in the medbay that he’d tossed out the window. They’d offered sensory implants in his optic nerves and he’d tried to claw the doctor’s eyes out. When a fellow acolyte had suggested he at least get a sensory net implanted in his fingertips so he’d stop walking into walls Chirrut had swung a clay jug with unerring accuracy at his head, spitting. “Why? Your eyes clearly do you no good either, and you don’t have any implants!”

Plenty on the Temple council would have just as soon have given up on the boy, send him down to the planet NaJedha for therapy and retraining and be done with it. They couldn’t seem to help him. He found no solace in the will of the Force.

Radfer the Alms Master, however, didn’t agree. The old Abbot asked him why.

“He said he doesn’t like the way people look at him,” Radfer spoke slowly. Radfer was in charge of the part of the Temple that saw the widest array of people in their most varying states of being. He collected the alms, tithes and donations and saw to their distribution among the needy as well as within the Temple. He was as aged as the old Abbot, both had seen roughly a century and a half each, and years of coaxing money out of the grudging pilgrim had led people to believe Radfer was meek as milksop when really he was just generally mild.

He, of all people, understood the necessity of dealing with people _as they were_. He had learned not to take lack of gratitude personally.

The old Abbot had blinked at his assertion. “How can he tell?”

“I wondered that myself,” Radfer replied dryly. “So I asked him. He says he can feel it. He can feel it as they look at him.”

A young acolyte (who remembered ducking a clay jug) had protested. “He’s not a Jedi level sensitive. He doesn’t have a high enough count for that.”

“There are many levels of sensitivity and perception in the Force. There are more ways to measure the Force than through midichlorians,” the Abbot had chastised gently, to which the young man had flushed. “The Force moves in mysterious ways.”

“So it does, Father,” Radfer broke in before the acolyte could go off on one of his rambling and obsequious apologies. “With your permission, I’d like to keep trying. The boy has endured much and is still recovering. Also, I should like to point out that he has had no formal training to deal with his blindness. His methods of adaption are all self taught, which given his level of self reliance isn’t a mean feat. The medbay can certainly attest to his aim!”

The acolyte went a deeper red.

“He’s intelligent. Persistent. He survived a fever that should have had liquid brains running from his ears. Father, I really believe the Force has delivered him to us for good reason,” Radfer pressed. “Are we so enamoured with quiet that we send away a boy who screams for help?”

“There is help for him,” the acolyte burst out, aggrieved by what he thought was Radfer slighting him. “Plenty of help – better equipped help – elsewhere. The child is a menace! Violent! Rude!”

“Ungrateful?” Radfer broke in mildly. It still stopped the acolyte in his tracks. “The best help is given freely, is it not? Freely, nothing returned. Not even gratitude. Nowhere is it written that thank you is necessary for good to be done. Polite, perhaps. But not necessary.”

“You always did like the most feral strays, my friend,” the old Abbot was smiling. “Calm down, my assistant. Radfer does not mock you,” he added to his assistant, who was spluttering.

“I like challenges,” Radfer spoke levelly. “We are the keepers of dust and memory. Memory turns into tradition and tradition into ceremony and, sooner or later, everything just becomes a habit. We become complacent. We cease to think for ourselves. We cease to grow. Some growth might prove good for our souls.”

The old Abbot smiled at his friend. “Growth can be a painful thing for all concerned.”

“Most worthy things are, Father,” Radfer shrugged.  “The Force wills all.”

“So it does, old friend. So it does,” the old Abbot nodded. “I assume you have been shown a way forward?”

“Allow me to say only this,” Radfer grinned. “If the Force connects all things; we should make use of the connections.”

Chirrut was unaware of such a debate raging around his future. He would have scorned and spat upon all participants equally had he been. He was a pure contrarian about both help and hindrance.

Right now, he was on his knees picking up shards of glass. He’d gotten a little better at getting around in the past few weeks – on his own recognisance, thank you very much – but the Temple was old and the stonecrafters had long since gone from it. There were plenty of loose tiles and patches of shifting mosaic, mortar returning to the sand from whence it came. It was like they _designed_ it to be a death trap for someone like him.

No matter, Chirrut thought resentfully. He’d dropped the glass. He’d damn will pick it up, every last shard. He wasn’t – here his thoughts turned bitter as kera fruit – a _burden_. He didn’t need their pity. It burned and stung. He almost liked the pompous acolyte he’d nearly brained with the jug. His flash of anger had been a jolt, but it had been pure, refreshing as a cold bath.

It didn’t occur to him that no one else could sense things the way he sensed them.

“Your way of cleaning is very strange.”

Chirrut jerked up, nearly slashing his thumb with a shard. Bewildered he turned in the direction of the steps; someone must have come up... or rather, was still coming up them, because that voice was low to the ground. It was hard to tell it’s direction, though. Whoever it was hadn’t made a sound on approach.

“Strange indeed, it is,” the gnarled old voice continued.

Some spirit of his kind mother rose in the garden of Chirrut’s conscience. “Careful. There’s shards everywhere. I haven’t gotten them all yet,” he mumbled, dropping is head and willing the person to either climb back down or go on their merry way around. This place was lousy with pilgrims and he didn’t particularly feel like putting on a show.

“Better to use a broom, perhaps?” the voice continued.

Chirrut gritted his teeth. “It’s fine.”

“Fine? You will do this all day and most of the night, I think!”

“So what if I do?” Chirrut snapped back hotly. “I’ll do it and I’ll do it by myself! What is it to you, anyway? Just go around.” Suddenly he blinked. The creaky old voice wasn’t on the stairs, it was there, near the damn patch of loose tiles that had started this whole mess. But that would make the pilgrim short; very short indeed.

“Taking a journey by the longest path is commendable to will,” the old voice cackled. “But wise, it is often not! Both conviction and common sense, the wise must have.”

Chirrut felt rather judged by this. “I don’t know where the brooms are,” he muttered, red faced.

“Then ask, you should. He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever, he does.”

Chirrut shifted back onto his knees and heels. “Who are you, then?”

“A wise question, that is,” Master Yoda smiled.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chirrut didn’t know it, but he’d made a mortal enemy that day that would affect the course of his life. Of course, at the time everyone he met was an enemy to him, so it wouldn’t have occurred to or bothered him to know at least one person fully agreed with him.

Yes, it was the Abbot’s personal acolyte who would one day be the Abbot in turn; whose rise to high office was ever to be marred by the unfortunate circumstances of his name – Abbhat. But before he became the bewildering Abbot Abbhat, he was a merely confusing Brother Abbhat and the best and brightest within the Temple up-and-comers.

He was the hope of a generation. His knowledge of history was unsurpassed, aptitude for Force sciences was much more than acceptable and he’d corrected his own teachers in theology and philosophy. He trained with the other priests in the salle and his form was perfect, his tactics exquisite. He was one of the youngest to walk the seven precincts and join the senior clergy; as an aide, for now, but everyone could see the burning engine of his ambition would thrust him to the top sooner or later. He was a meticulous organiser and an erudite and eloquent preacher of the Force. To look upon him was to be inspired to unholy spurts of envy for his talents.

But it is strange but undeniable truth that while other may judge us by our advancements, we judge ourselves by our disappointments. Brother Abbhat’s drive was the result of a particularly harsh one.

Abbhat was a foundling; he’d been left swaddled on the doorstep of the Temple of the Whills as a newborn. He embodied all the best traditions of the Temple in that sense. Here was a boy come from nothing that the Force has given to the Temple, knowing he would be needed – or so the story goes. His midichlorian count was high, so he stayed as per tradition. It was one of the reasons for his many talents, actually. It was right on the cusp of Jedi high.

When he was young he’d actually been taken to Coruscant. He’d stayed there for a year, learning with the other Jedi children. But circumstances would conspire against him in this. At the time the Jedi were suffering from an overload of recruits. Had there been a war on, or some other calamity, then young Abbhat would have been set on the path to his destiny.

But... it had been a peaceful time then. The Jedi had the luxury of discernment. They did not have to scrape the bottom of the midichlorian scale to fill their compliment, and no matter which way you looked at it Abbhat was at the bottom of that particular barrel. So... they had decided that that his destiny lay on Jedha, at the Temple of the Whills, not in the Temple of the Jedi proper.

Even Chirrut had to admit (much later) that there was a strand of cruelty inherent in what the Jedi had done. The decision to send the boy back to his origins hadn’t been personal. It happened to many potentials and more often than most believed. But the fact remained he was just old enough to understand being sent as an honoured ambassador only to return to the dusty earth soon after in more ways than one and, while he knew intellectually that the Jedi wouldn’t suddenly realise they’d made a mistake, the hopeful boy that waited tirelessly on the steps of the Temple had become a small but significant part of his makeup thereafter.

“I really am dreadfully sorry for being late!” Abbhat was flustered, and he hated being flustered. His usual poise had abandoned him. “And now Master Yoda is lost!”

The Jedi Master who had accompanied the venerable Jedi teacher merely smiled gently at the young man’s frazzlement. “Do not worry. Master Yoda has been many things, but I have never once known him to be _lost_. He’s a bit like a felis kit. If he has nothing to hold his attention he wanders off until he finds something.”

Abbhat was torn between being in awe and aghast at Master Yoda (his teacher! His very own teacher at the Coruscant Temple, here!) being described at a wayward kitten.

“I can _see_ that!” piped a delighted voice, awash with excitement. For a moment, Abbhat didn’t recognise it.

“You perceive the Force, you do. Know it, you did not, but shows you all you need, it does. Sense me, do you now? Feel my presence where before only sound was I?” Yoda’s voice had a smile in it.

“Yes! You’re there. You’re right _there!_ ”

Yoda made a satisfied sound. “As long as you see the Force, _blind_ they will never rightly call you.”

Abbhat heart plummeted in his chest. It couldn’t be....

He hurried up the steps, overtaking the Jedi master he was escorting in his haste.

It _was_. The ungrateful brat who’d thrown a jug at him, who was the bane of the medbay, who took any hand outstretched towards him and savaged it. He was grinning and crying with delight, spinning amongst a constellation of glittering glass shards held up by the mere wave of the hand of a Jedi. Abbhat felt a lurch in his heart as he saw the ease with which they touched the Force.

Small wonder he hadn’t recognised that voice. The boy looked completely different, a totally new boy, free of the enraged scowl pinching his features and curling his fingers into claws. He looked...well, normal. Blind, but normal.

“Now, pick up the pieces, you must,” Yoda instructed and, wonder of wonders, the boy actually _did as he was told_ , plucking shards from mid air as unerringly and as accurately as if he saw them with working eyes.

Abbhat’s feelings on this matter were indescribable. To see the Jedi Master ( _his_ teacher) take such an interest in the graceling boy whose count was nowhere near high enough to endear him to the Jedi, who shouldn’t have the _privilege_ of such an honour... for moment, Abbhat could only stare, dumbstruck, too many emotions vying for ascendency and causing his brain to fuse.

The Jedi Master who had followed him up the steps either didn’t know or chose not to acknowledge the turmoil in the young man next to him. Instead he merely sighed. “I thought we were here to inspect the new seam of unusual Kyber’s the Sage’s had found.” He sounded amused.

“Qui-Gon Jinn chastising _me_ for taking in strays, is he?” Yoda cackled with laughter while they both smiled over the delighted blind boy, laughing and dancing with the shards. “Most amusing, that is!”

Across the courtyard and leaning on the mezzanine balcony of one of the cloisters, Radfer smiled to himself.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------


	3. Chapter Three: The Path Of The Douchecanoe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A look into Chirrut's past and Baze and Chirrut trading wits on the ship. Neither of them seem particularly concerned about being abductor and abductee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: As usual, don't own Rogue One, don't make money off 'em

Chapter Three: The Path Of The Douchecanoe

Even shorn of his trademark blasters, Baze Malbus cut an intimidating figure. He was big, and he moved like he was even bigger, carrying the air of someone who would burn planets if it got the job done. If he had any doubts, any reservations, they didn’t show up in his stride.

It was such a waste, therefore, when he made it to the brig to find himself faced with a corridor of closed doors. The ship, whose name Baze had never bothered to remember, occasionally had to double up as a minor prison transport for the Kaafee so they were well equipped to take reluctant passengers. Baze had never found a reason to be down here himself; prisoner guard work was for the plebes, not the specialists. Once the prisoner was secured on the landing pad, Baze’s work was generally done. And he’d never been thrown in himself; military they most definitely weren’t, but on occasion a crew member might get roaring drunk or cooked on spice and they’d be down here sleeping it off before they were conscripted to clean up whatever mess they’d made. It was a fair trade that kept the pack of rough edged misfits from killing each other when they indulged.

 Well, Baze wasn’t the indulging type and it wasn’t because of the Temple education either. Kriffing hell, the monks weren’t dry – not even the Jedi kept that kind of proscription. He just tended not to dull his senses in the presence of those he didn’t trust. That was just pure survival.

He scanned the ID tag screens on the doors until he found the one he was looking for and punched in the unlock code.

Chirrut was folded into meditation; Baze could hear the familiar refrain of the basic chant. _I am one with the Force. The Force is with me_. He seemed totally unconcerned and unless Baze was reading him incorrectly it was because he was, in fact, totally unconcerned.

“It is good to see you, my friend,” Chirrut’s voice shattered Baze’s concentration, as it did. “Figuratively speaking, of course.”

Baze sighed. “Likewise, graceling.” He looked the other man over. “You look taller.”

“You look just the same as when I last saw you,” Chirrut replied swiftly.

“Your wit hasn’t changed much, I see,” Baze rolled his eyes. “Still in desperate need of a tune up.”

Chirrut smiled at him. “My wit is fine. My audience is merely humour deficient – a terrible shame.”

“You look older,” Baze replied, closing the door behind him. “I know you sages are supposed to be venerable but you are conforming a bit much.” This was a little bit of hyperbole; yes, Chirrut was older but he did not look so old. His face was still mostly unlined and his short cropped hair dark. He looked stretched, like he was made of nothing but joints. He’d been training.

“A natural consequence of time passing, sandlark,” Chirrut sighed. “And I’ll thank you not to make an attack I cannot answer in kind; you are many things, but dishonourable you are not.”

To this Baze grimaced and, of course, Chirrut picked up what he didn’t say in the beat of silence.

“You’ll never have me believe you murdered someone in their bed, or children in the streets, sandlark.”

“No, but there is plenty of dirty work in the universe, graceling, and my hands seemed suited to it,” Baze rumbled as he perched on the edge of the bed Chirrut knelt on. “I know how well you hear, but sometimes you must see a stain to truly understand it.” He had no idea why, but he defended his profession. He refused to give ground when it came to standing by his choices.

“I do see,” Chirrut informed him in a low voice. “I see with this,” he tapped his chest. “I see in here.” He reached out pressed a hand against Baze’s.

_Right_ , Baze re-tuned his mental frequency to Chirrut’s wavelength. How could he have forgotten? Chirrut saw by feeling what others felt. It wasn’t his senses that were enhanced, though they were definitely honed sharp with use. It was his empathy that he’d repurposed for sight. Baze wondered idly if his mental shape was different to Chirrut now.

“Not so much,” Chirrut grinned at him.

Baze glowered at him. The worst thing was it wasn’t actually telepathy.  “Don’t make an attack I can’t answer. What are you doing here, graceling? You were a sage, _rishisudra_. The worthy ones. They don’t leave the Temple, not for jobs like this.” Mostly because the Guardians would lock them in their rooms before letting them try. The worthy ones were precious, to be protected, always.

 “The future is always in motion. Whatever I _was_ is not what I am now. I joined the Guardians years ago. I haven’t run the four towers yet nor taken the oaths. This was my journey trial,” Chirrut smiled proudly.

Journey trial meant he was close to completion. Bewildered, Baze asked. “You never walked the seven precincts?”

“Oh, yes,” Chirrut waved a hand. “A bit of a cheat for me; as if I didn’t know every step of those halls. It’s as if they didn’t consider who was doing the sweeping down there!”

Baze ignored this. “Why?” he demanded. “Why give it up? You were born for the priesthood. You were good at it, you enjoyed it!”

Chirrut’s smiled dimmed for the first time. “You need not concern yourself with my skill; I passed the tests.”

He probably had too; with flying colours, just to rub it in. Others might call Chirrut meticulous and thoroughly determined, but Baze knew he was, in reality, the universe’s most stubborn cuss. Baze seized him by the chin to keep him from turning his face away. “Hey. That’s not what I said, graceling. I don’t know about you, but _I’m_ not blind; you’ve packed on enough muscle to tow an ore cart. What I was asking you was; why give up something which even you can’t deny you were suited for?” Eminently suited for, Baze added in his head. Chirrut had embodied, for him, all the best parts of the priesthood.

“All is as the Force wills it,” Chirrut intoned like the completely evil troll he was.

“Yeah, alright,” Baze huffed impatiently. “But why did you really do it?”

Chirrut grinned at him, indirect insult forgiven. “Mostly because there were few options left for Temple initiates like me.”

Baze’s eyebrows rose. Since when would there be few options for someone raised in the...oh. “Abbot Squared still in charge, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That asshole.”

“Oh, yes.”

The fact the Chirrut actually agreed with him meant the man had become, against all odds, an even bigger asshole. “Did _he_ send you on this trip?”

“The Force sent me,” Chirrut replied levelly.

Baze sighed through his nose. That was all he was going to get on the subject, at least for now. “If you say so.”

Chirrut gave him a strange smile. “I can’t understand how you don’t believe, given the circumstances my friend. Ten years of total separation, you out in the wide universe and I unlikely to leave a very small moon within it. And yet, here we are, you and I,” Chirrut reached up and ran his fingertips over Baze’s face. Contrary to his usual policy of a five and half feet don’t-fuck-with-me field between himself and anyone else, Baze allowed this. “What in the galaxy would you call that – could you call that – but the Force?”

“I would call that dumb luck,” Baze muttered. Gods dammit, he doesn’t _blush_. He hasn’t the right skin for it, for a start. “Dumb, dumb luck, since we are now in a situation I’m not sure I can get us out of.”

“Oh dear,” Chirrut frowned, but Baze held out no hope of his reading the situation with a good sense of how dire it was. He was right. “You never did grow into your ears, did you? No wonder you grew the hair out; it hides them nicely.”

“Chirrut,” Baze growled.

“I don’t know what possible reason you could have for the goatee though.”

“ _Chirrut.”_

“You Captain wants the Kybers,” Chirrut abruptly refocused. “Well, the Force has willed him to be disappointed because the ships crew didn’t _have_ any and never did. We were meant to pick up refugees of Ohmolon in accordance with the ancient Treaty of Rivers, pledging our assistance to the vulnerable. We take in a few dozen every half year.”

Baze’s eyes narrowed. “And that’s all?”

“That’s all I have to say,” Chirrut shrugged. “If your Captain wishes for more I wish him luck wringing wine from thin air.”

Baze stayed silent a long time, before abruptly standing. “I’ll be back.”

“Of that I have no doubt, my friend,” Chirrut smiled.

“By the way,” Baze said dryly on his way out. “The ship’s crew might not have any Kybers, but you certainly do,” he reached out and gently took the stick that was propped against the wall. He was amazed they’d let him keep it, but Chirrut had probably pulled a little old blind man act on them; ha. The fact that they’d fallen for it was testament to Chirrut’s winning ways. Baze was the man to go to if you wanted an impossible situation solved with strength and persistence but Chirrut was the man you went to if you wanted an impossible situation solved with sheer nerve.

With deft fingers that still remembered after a decade, Baze unfolded the hidden Kyber cored minor bowcaster. Tiny it might be, but Baze knew these things packed a respectable punch. “Do me a favour and don’t use this,” he snapped it closed again and handed it to a bemused Chirrut. “Until it’s either that or die. I’m sure Bran’s drilled it into your head that fire draws fire and, you might not know it blind man, but we’re in a _spaceship_. Fire bad.”

If Chirrut was taken aback by Baze’s uncanny insight, he didn’t show it. He laughed. “Very well, my friend. I shall merely crack skulls with it.”

No doubt.

“Your Captain must be pleased to have found you,” Chirrut added. “You are a man of many skills.”

“He’s not my Captain. He’s a captain,” Baze muttered as he took his leave. “And the pleasure is all his.”

“Some words of advice, then, sandlark,” Chirrut offered.

Baze paused near the door frame.

“Do not follow the path of the douchecanoe; he will invariably take you up shit creek without a paddle.”

Baze rolled his eyes and shut the door on the incorrigible monk’s snickers. Past the soundproofing he let out a belly full of rumbling laughter.

That was Chirrut, all right.

Gods, Baze loved him so much.

He found the next door he was looking for; it had a huge, blinking DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES warning light.

He opened the door, heart not even slightly elevated.

From out of the darkness the voice of duty came, and it _roared_.

In fact, it roared [I wondered when you’d get around to talking to me. Did you think to avoid it?]

Baze sighed. “I lived in hope, Master.”

\-------------------------------------------------------------

Chirrut’s world is a world of numbers.

He hadn’t known it at the time of his childhood, but he had a head for them; calculations and odds, physics and percentages; an endless capacity for making numbers march obediently on the inside of his skull and a phenomenal memory to boot. Whatever this would have meant for a sighted life he didn’t know but when he was blinded numbers turned into a skeleton key that unlocked the world.

Yoda had given him a rough and ready primer into his new, replacement sense before he’d had to leave but that would be a long time in mastering. Yoda had called it empathy, but he hadn’t said the word like the mother who had taught him it did. It was a frustratingly difficult thing to describe to the sighted, the way his empathy traced their emotional lines in his heart, how he saw them without seeing them.

While young Chirrut struggled with sorting out what he felt from what everyone else felt, numbers were the answer to his immediate problem. Master Jinn had gotten him into the habit of counting his steps; he’d ask at random how many steps from here to there, from here onwards and Chirrut had gotten so fed up with being wrong that he’d started to count all the time. It got to the point where he didn’t notice he was doing it, where it was as automatic as breathing. That’s where the fun really started.

The Temple was an ancient place and it had been washed by many cultural tides; however, some ideas persisted in the face of aeons and one was the sacred numbers. Oh, how the ancient proto-Jedi had loved their numbers. Maybe it was in part because the ultimately found their first recruits in a race of mining engineers and engineers like well rounded ratios and strong shapes. No matter how time had shaped and reshaped the Temple of the Whills, the ones that built it were a race of order and neatness. The Temple was built upon that ideal.

Two. Three. Four. Seven. As long as you knew those numbers and the multiples of those numbers, getting around the Temple was a cake walk. Each corridor on the seven lowest levels had seven or a multiple of seven doorways. There were exactly twenty eight tile rows between each door, no matter where you were in the temple. There were sixteen mid-levels with sixteen corridors and twenty one doors each. There were three upper levels with sixteen doors apiece, and the four internal minarets all had forty two lots of twenty eight stairs separated by three landings consisting of exactly twenty one tiles rows each.  Each entry or centre facing doorway had the pillars twisted into two spirals – one for the light side and one for the dark side of the Force. Each exit facing archway had three curls in the stone pillars, one for light, and one for dark and one for the pilgrim who had entered the Temple and come out enlightened.

The run of the Four Towers was ninety eight turns, three trials, two meditations and one lengthy oath. The walk of the Seven Precincts, which wended it’s way from the very bottom of what the acolytes like Abbhat would call the Well of Enlightenment but the miners affectionately called the hellshaft, spiralling up through every section of the Temple to end in its centre was exactly two thousand, six hundred and eighty nine ceremonial steps. The number drove Chirrut mad until he sat down and thought it through, realising that the journey was seven multiplied by seven seven times, plus four multiplied by four four times, plus three multiplied by three three times, plus two multiplied by two, plus one. The one was important under certain conditions. It represented being at one with the Force and it also turned the whole formula into a prime number, divisible only by one.   

When Chirrut realised he was one of the few who knew this – or at least, had rediscovered that old bit of wisdom, he’d sat down and had a good long laugh.

The older Chirrut that sat in a cell and was supposedly waiting for all sorts of not-so-fun things to happen to him, smiled at the memory. It didn’t occur to him to fear his abductors. For one, Chirrut wasn’t in the habit of fearing anyone or anything, and wasn’t about to start now. And for two... Baze Malbus.

“I am at one with the Force, the Force is with me,” Chirrut murmured with the assurance of muscle memory. He turned his stick with it’s hidden sting in his hands. “I am at one with the Force and the Force is with me. I thank the Force for this day, the past days and all my days henceforth for bringing him back to me.”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not all of Chirrut’s time in the Temple was as rosy as his final adaption to blindness.  

He learned early in his rough path into the Temple that not everyone was fond of him being there. The Abbot seemed to like him, or at least not be offended by him. Radfer was kind and constantly negotiating with the Treasury to withdraw enough funds to get him expensive learning equipment, but the other Temple children were wary and other older students were downright hostile. Chirrut knew this, and he knew why; when they looked at his sightless gaze, he could feel the fear in those eyes looking back, outlining them in the Force to him. Since he wasn’t quite savvy enough yet to know the smartest thing he could do was _not point that out_ , Chirrut gained many fights but few friends amongst his age peers. When school was out, he found it a better strategy to simply disappear.

He found a niche where he could thrive within Radfer’s Alms gatherers, most of whom were gracelings too – misfits and lost ones, some unable to deal with the world outside the Temple. Chirrut’s days became a parade of street walking with the others, collecting and distributing alms, or doing chores in the Temple. The Alms gatherers generally doubled as service staff as well as social workers, so it wasn’t unusual to see Radfer’s people benignly ignored while they scrubbed, shone and swept. They were low in the hierarchy, engaged in the physical work of life; honoured but not necessarily respected for taking on the onerous jobs.

Chirrut’s personal favourite was the broom. There was no cloaking device ever invented that could outmatch a broom for rendering a person invisible. Years were peacefully swept aside under it’s auspices as Chirrut grew stronger in body from the work and wiser for knowing every single inch of the Temple.

Still, the Abbot’s aide and soon to be Abbot Abbhat’s interference was an unfortunate constant in his life.

At this moment, Chirrut was packing his meagre possessions with anger in every line of his body. Oh, he didn’t stomp or throw things; in fact, a casual observer would be hard pressed to spot the boiling temper at all. Chirrut packed like he did all things; with sand grain level meticulousness and eerie precision. His movements were so sharp, so efficient though, that after a while one could see the tension he was hiding in every joint. Outside this tiny cell he would be as calm and as liquid graceful as he ever was, but here where no one could see he gave his temper a moment with the pressure valve off.

Well, almost no one.

“What troubles you, my son?”

Chirrut sighed, but silently. For such a big man Radfer barely made a sound as he walked. Chirrut had sensed the Force lensing around him in a healthy warm glow, though, the taste of concern and bemusement both in the air. He was worried about his aide and sought peace for him. That was Radfer. He sought peace for everybody. “Why nothing at all, Brother. All is as the Force wills it, through the mouth of the Abbot’s aide.”

He felt the wry smile that chased its way across the bear-like man’s expressive face. “I know he makes it very difficult,” Radfer said gently. “But do try not to provoke him so. He is wrestling with many difficulties. His antipathy of you may be an unworthy thing, but you shouldn’t make his fault yours.”

Chirrut grimaced at that. “I did not seek to provoke him. I never seek to provoke him. I merely pointed out that if he wished to save credits he might not buy out so very many cargo ships.”

“Now, now, you know how proud he is of the new fleet,” Radfer admonished mildly. “He’s trying to invest for the future in them. Besides, your comment hardly changed his mind, my aide. And he has assigned you new rooms – again!”

Yes, that was one of his usual tricks. Chirrut didn’t think he’d stayed in the same room more than two months at a time. The pettiness of it drove him to distraction. This time the excuse was that as he was now Radfer’s aide and fifteen, he should have his own cell away from the dormitories of the others.

“Any idea where you’re going?” Radfer asked.

Chirrut shrugged. “Somewhere dusty and unused, no doubt. I expect the view will be the same as it ever is, though.”

Radfer laughed heartily at the boy’s wit, which won a faint smile from said boy. “So he makes a salvo and misses the point entirely. How like him.”

“Why aren’t you angry?” Chirrut shook his head as he closed his little case.

“Should I be?”

“Brother, he is casting half the gracelings from the Temple,” Chirrut burst out, the rawness of the insult that made him snap back still fresh. “Who is he, exactly, to cast them out? By what right... he’s not even the Abbot!”

Radfer sighed. “So that is where your anger lies. My young friend... sit. Meditate with me a while. Release you anger; it does you more harm than good. It certainly will not help those whose plight makes you defensive.”

Chirrut huffed, but did as he was told; kneeling on the floor and dropping into the breathing rhythm and cadence _I am at one with the Force, the Force is with me_ with the ease of years practice. The familiar cycle did help calm him down, easing loose the burr of perturbation the Abbot’s aide’s saccharine plotting had left him with.

“Really my young aide; you should know by now that undirected anger serves no good,” Radfer chided him mildly. “Why, if you had maintained self control you could be eating dinner now instead of packing!”

Chirrut sighed. “Forgive me. You are right, of course. Surely there’s the Force willing something in this. It is difficult to stand for this, though, Force willed or not. Those people are my friends, my comrades. Abbhat’s wrath on them seems...well, the product of bias. It is difficult to swallow his edicts knowing they are rooted in injustice.”

“The universe in unjust, Brother Imwe. Only in the Force do all things balance. Besides,” Radfer added more lightly. “Do you honestly think I haven’t made any arrangements for our departing comrades? Brother Abbhat may dictate their lives here in the Senior Abbot’s place as his successor, but really, my boy, you must try not to be so _literal_. The Alms gatherers have many friends in the city that came to us in their hour of need. We now reach back to them in ours. They shall all be taken care of.”

Chirrut flushed. Of course Radfer had made arrangements. That was his way; if someone needed help, then help they got it regardless. For a devout man, he had a somewhat flexible interpretation of the Temple rules.

“There now, you see? You waste energy on Brother Abbhat, where you could have been spending it more productively in the markets, keeping your ears open for new situations for the gracelings. _That_ would have been useful, yes?” Radfer grinned at him.

“Yes, Brother. It would have been.” Thoroughly told, Chirrut rose to collect his things.

“Well, there you are, then. My advice to you, my aide,” Radfer grunted as he too rose. “Is to not throw yourself upon a boulder and expect the boulder to care. Sniping at Brother Abbhat, however objectionable his world view, helps no one least of all you. Don’t give him the honour of being unkind simply because _he_ is.”

_Always be kinder than you need to be, my love. Even when they’re not kind to you. Especially then._ The whispering voice of his mother rose in his memory. Her face was all but faded now. “Yes, Master Radfer. I will do better.”

“I’m sure you will,” Radfer picked up his case. “Come now; I want to see your new digs.”

Which turned out, the computer affirmed, to be back in a dusty, seldom used area down the back of where they used to do ceremonies before the big ceremonial courtyard was opened to the public. Once the whole mesa top had been the Temple and all the rest had lived below; no so now. The new room was bigger than his old room, though covered in a layer of sand and half stuffed with old broken furniture.

No; not furniture. Consoles; comm consoles that were ancient, even for the Temple. There were lights glowing faintly under the layer of thick dust and from the old fashioned stand microphone there came a babble of voices. It sounded like the system was linked to the mines beneath NiJedha.

“Well,” Radfer coughed. “It’ll be pleasant enough once we sweep and dust. And turn off all the consoles.”

“Oh, no sir,” the droid they’d asked for directions from fluttered. “You can’t turn these off. It’s the auxiliary mine broadcast system; turning it off is prohibited by law, in case of emergency.”

There was a blank silence.

“Oh,” Radfer said eventually.

Chirrut had just sighed; point to Abbhat.

\---------------------------------------------------------------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BEWARE! Flying Headcanon balls! 
> 
> Okay; let me state again for the record that I haven't read any of the official canon material so there's probably key things I'm missing. However, I like AU's because if I didn't I wouldn't be reading fanfiction.
> 
> To my mind Jedha is not a secular government; the Temple, in addition to being in charge of prayer, penitence and preaching, is also in charge of running all the social and civil duties of state, like any other religion ruled nation. They collect taxes, supply utilities, handle trade and run the judiciary (though they probably borrow much of their legal code from either the Galactic Senate (which will turn out to be a mistake) or from NaJedha, the planet they circle). So, to be a priest or sage of the Whills is not just about spiritual mastery but also involves being a government official of sorts. Chirrut would have given up quite a bit of authority when he chose to join the Guardians instead.
> 
> The Guardians probably would have doubled as a rough and ready police force for the city; before the Clone Wars got going, anyway. It follows therefore that Baze, as a fully trained Guardian at the time of this story, would have had at least the basics of crime investigation within his skill set.


	4. Chapter Three: It’s Darkest When The Lights Are Off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baze chats with the past. In the past, he chats with Chirrut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: As usual, I don't own 'em and I make no money off 'em.

It remained a long standing mystery how a Wookiee ended up on Jedha at all, let alone joined the Guardians of the Temple. Let alone went straight to the Guard Master, at that. If there was a thread that showed a clear line of sight from Kashyyyk to Jedha that made sense, no one had been able to find it. Speculation was rife once upon a time; Master Branaarkel had been kidnapped as a youngling and raised amongst travelling troupes. Master Branaarkel once led an unsuccessful attack against the Temple and chose a path of honour within it in return for the sparing of her comrades lives. Master Branaarkel received Force visions and had been exiled from the Jedi for preaching them... on it went, endlessly.

The reason why Baze was and remained one of Master Bran’s favoured students was that he, on day two of Guardian training, had politely asked her how she’d come to be here.

[Ship broke down. I needed credits to fix it. Offered the priests some paid work as a training dummy. Stayed.] she’d shrugged. [You know, you’re one of the few that’s ever asked. Good for you. If you’re going to go around catching criminals you’ve got to look the truth in the eye and not flinch.]

Then she’d sent him end over end to the edge of the training yard.

[Also remember an opponent isn’t less dangerous because she’s decided to talk first.]

Baze had always known that they’re must have been more to it that her blunt and concise rendition of her history. There must have been a spark of Force faith in there somewhere.

Faced with her now, Baze could maybe see a shadow of it in the way that she, too, rose from meditation, unruffled by the proceedings. She certainly hadn’t fought much coming in, which Baze’s co-workers were counting amongst the minor miracles of life. Baze, on the other hand, was a suspicious bastard.

“What’s really going on here?” Baze asked her.

[Show me your evidence,] was Bran’s reply.

 Baze felt a rush of nostalgia; just like the old days, where she would force every recruit to go through every painstaking step of their reasoning while in relentlessly picked holes in it. Those that had trained their bodies and not their minds for Guardianship had often been disconcerted and quite often departed in dismay. Bran had no use for brawn that didn’t use it’s brains. The Brothers and Sisters that joined the Guardians had to be keenly fast thinkers; as sharp as their Master, who could deduce what a man did for a living by looking at their fingers and shoes.

Baze was a Guardian. He’d run the Four Towers, he’d spoken the oath. Short of the Temple excommunicating him – which they hadn’t – he was a Guardian for life whether he was there or not.

“Chirrut – Brother Imwe – just told me he’s on his journey trial; which is a load of bantha crap because if he was then you wouldn’t be here. He also said that you never had any Kybers which also can’t be true because otherwise you wouldn’t have even gotten Master Ja and Master Lemutan out of the artisans quarters,” the two Masters were cutter and lens grinders extraordinaire, currently in the other cells. “ _You_ came quietly. You, who once snapped a Mayderian’s leg in four places for looking at a priest wrong. Who, exactly, are you trying to bait? It can’t be these clowns,” he jerked a thump at the ship’s wall. “They never showed any interest in Kybers until this point.”

 [Well reasoned,] which was high praise from Bran.

“Diverting me with compliments?” Baze replied to this dryly. “Now I know this is bad.”

Bran growled. [I keep forgetting your mother ruined you for praise.]

“Chirrut knows that I can tell when he lies,” Baze shook his head. “I can’t tell whether he’s trying to divert me or drop hints. I’m too close to him to see it properly. Always have been.”

[He missed you, you know. Many did,] Bran rumbled.

“And you?” Baze asked archly.

Bran snorted. [I miss any student whom I had to out so little effort into to get such big results. But...] here her voice grew heavy. [I understood why you left. Imwe didn’t.]

Baze would just have sooner not visit the past. “Why is he here, Master?” He looked her in the eye. They were Guardians. They wouldn’t lie to one another. “Why is Chirrut here? He wasn’t meant for the _palaka_.”

[Radfer passed into the Force... five years ago? Maybe six. Imwe took his place for a time. But the Abbot...the old Abbot died too; and he was sick for a while before. The new Abbot,] Baze was gratified to see the sneer on the wookiee’s mouth. [Well, let’s just say he was a bit overeager in stepping into his old Master’s shoes. He slid in while the old Abbot was still wearing them. He instituted many... changes.]

“Like?”

[Like ending Alms gathering and distribution, for one,] she snarled, as Baze’s eyebrows jumped upwards. [He’s trying to make us into a Jedi Temple. The Jedi don’t collect alms, so we don’t anymore. The Jedi own land and fleets for their cash, so we do. The Abbot said we could ensure cash flows from the Senate subsidies and from higher taxation. All visitors are taxed now, kind of like a forced donation. So are the ferrymen and their ships. So are the _vaisyasudra_ , the merchants and professionals.]

Baze was genuinely shocked. “What about the gracelings? The Alms collectors?”

Bran wrinkled her nose in deep disgust. [They can stay on, provided they pay their way. If they can’t... apparently the Temple can’t afford drains on resources like that anymore.]

For a full minute Baze can’t speak for sheer _outrage_. Gracelings were often sick or suffered under mental or physical afflictions. The Guardians had been so gentle with them; they’d had to be. Bran had made it very clear what would happen to a Guardian that raised a hand to the vulnerable. “That _asshole_ ,” Baze snarled. “He turned the frail and the sick out into the cold? What the hell kind of priest is he?”

[Some stayed. Imwe made spaces wherever he could; they do the work while others are free to dwell on higher things,] she sneered the last words. [Aeons of attacks, raids and theft attempts and that idiot stumbled on the only way yet that has worked to bring the Temple to it’s knees.] Bran roared the word. [ _Economics_.]

Baze growled under his breath. For the first time since this started, he felt fully justified in leaving the Temple. What a hell it must have become. “The _yahvasudra_?”

[Live in the Temple. There’s few mining families anymore and no miners settlements. The Abbot imports labour on the cheap from Outer Rim worlds. There’s only room for two kinds of workers in the Temple now; those that mine the rocks and those that cut them. There’s no Alms collectors; just cleaners, janitors. Imwe was asked to leave too.]

“ _What?”_ For second Baze is so enraged he wants to take over the ship just to go back to Jedha and punch the Abbot’s teeth out.

[Calm down, Guardian, it didn’t take,] the wookiee gave a toothy grin. [He sat on the Temple steps with a begging bowl and spun stories for tourists. Scared the ever loving bejeesus out of a few would be thieves. If the Temple was still taking in adult students, we’d’ve had some new converts.]

For a moment Baze in torn between boiling rage and laughing uproariously at Chirrut putting the fear of the Force into a few unsuspecting sinners. The two extremes cancelled each other out. “That’s why he joined the Guardians. It was either that or the artisans,” Baze breathed. “Of course he would pick the harder option,” he sighed.

Bran gave him a long look. [For him, that might have been the easier one. He had good grounding in it. And it brought back...happier memories.]

Baze said nothing.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Baze joined the Guardians academy when he turned sixteen. It had been a long, stressful year of waiting and working full time in the Kyber mine alongside his father and the rest of the _yahvasudra_ while all that time putting in applications, passing exams and medical tests. The mine work had added some much needed development on his muscles and had help him co-ordinate himself past his long awaited growth spurt. Physically he was ready, but he still felt like he was wearing a mark on his forehead, certain that the _rishisudra_ would take one look at him and see right through him, to the terrible secret lurking in his brain.

How indescribable was his relief, how total was his serenity, then, when on the first day their intimidating new Master Guardian Branaarkel had stalked out to loom over the hopefuls to bark out. [Do you believe in the Force? In the presence of energy connecting and binding us all? Good for you. I don’t give a flying fuck. I don’t care if you believe in the Force, in gods, in a mighty white pink-spotted bantha waiting to dump it’s holy load on your head. The only thing you need to believe in here the complete and total hell I will rain upon you should you fail in your duty.]

No wonder Baze had found the confidence to ask Master Bran ([Just Bran...no one ever pronounces it right]) about her origins. He’d already faced his most darkest fear.

Baze took to the place very well. Not all of them were here to become fully fledged Guardians; some students paid their way in to learn the fighting styles and the way of the bowcaster, to take lucrative bodyguard or militia work elsewhere. Their fees became part of the Temple’s profits and boy did the Temple charge for the privilege. Baze was lucky though. He’d had a sponsor within the Temple as all those on the Guardian path had. Lots of the miners children joined the Guard this way. They made friends at the Temple school, so finding a sponsor wasn’t difficult. The Temple was open to all who came to learn, of course, and even a pilgrim could find a sponsor on asking. Most pilgrims did not join the Temple proper. The joke went that most pilgrims came to pray rather than stay.

Baze’s sponsor was a man named Brother Abbhat.

Truth be told, Baze was a little unsure of himself around Abbhat, probably due to the mixed messages he got about the man from his parents. His father always treated the clergy with the utmost respect; they were honoured in his home. He liked Abbhat and was gratified by the interest he’d taken in their son since Baze had stumbled on the lost cache of Kybers. His mother, on the other hand, had a ready sneer for the man whenever he got in contact with the family. When questioned about this she would only state ‘I know a failure when I see one.’ Otherwise she was silent on the matter, and thereby gave her blessing for the connection to continue. Her life had taught her to take advantages wherever they were. Distaste was for those who had things to lose.

This was a source of some consternation for Baze’s father. His hard edged wife wasn’t the reverent type by any measure, but she usually treated the clergy with the same cold confidence as she dealt with everyone else. Abbhat seemed to rouse her ire. He was a loving man and never called her on it, and Baze had the impression that his mother stayed silent for his father’s sake, othwise her words for Abbhat would be...choice.

Well, Baze was grateful for the sponsorship and was therefore grateful to Abbhat. The man was not a hands-on sponsor. He didn’t require daily updates. Once a month, maybe, he would find time to have tea with his protégé and check on his progress; otherwise he was relegated to the background of Baze’s life.

Most things did in the face of his training. A lifetime with his mother had prepared Baze somewhat for the rigours of the Guardian’s life, but not as much as he’d thought it would. There was the expected meditation and endless, endless repetitions of forms and stances; that was expected. But suddenly they were hauling around weights to try to defeat Jedha’s slightly lower gravity, they were untying weights tied to their feet in the pitch dark of the water pond, they were climbing thousands of stairs every morning – and worse, every night when muscles screamed for rest. Half the young hopefuls were gone within a half month, and their number halved again once aptitude tests had to be delivered at the point of death by exhaustion after three days of no sleep. They had to learn the finer points of building a bowcaster and learn to shoot the thing with crack accuracy of a range of targets. Plus a host of other tests; being dumped in the desert to survive their way back to NiJedha and having to scale the mesa once they got there. They were forced to go without food or water for long stretches. They were ordered to break down crime scenes, read tracks and quote all the relevant legal articles which applied while they did it. Asked to improvise weapons; asked to improvise defences from random attacks from seasoned Guardians...the list was endless. It was a wonder anyone made it through.

Most of the time Baze’s ‘home’ was a blanket on a stone floor, piled together with other apprentices like firewood. On holy days students with family in NiJedha could go home and visit for a night or two, though. Baze learned to cherish these brief moments of peace, even though his mother would relentlessly check his forms and progress with the same gimlet eye as Master Bran. He’d shot up to his father’s height and breadth in an unbelievable amount of time, the swagger long wrenched out of him with brutal pliers. He’d never really hit an awkward stage. He’d simply filled out the space he was meant to fill out in the world, fully confident in his abilities.

Home was like seeing an oasis after a week in the desert. Heart easing, Baze shook off the dust of his travel cloak in the dust trap, kicked off his phenomenally heavy training boots and entered their neat little miners dwelling with nothing more on his mind that some sumptuous dumplings and fried halhaat from his father’s kitchen.

He knew something was wrong when he smelt smoking miners pasty, the only meal his mother could make and have even the slightest chance of not sending anyone to the med centre with food poisoning.

Stomach plummeting, Baze nearly ran to the kitchen to see... yes, his female parent scowling over the cooking unit, dark hair braided severely back from her face. “He’s sick,” she informed her son bluntly, never one for small talk.

Baze felt a sliver of anxiety wobble in his chest. His father was a man of robust health, impervious to Miasmas and anything else the planet had thrown at it.

“There you are, my boy,” the man himself appeared, big and broad shouldered. But for the slight rasp of his voice he seemed hale as ever.

Baze allowed the bear hug before stepping back to view then man closely, using his being-honed observational skills. Loose, open shirt, no boots – he hadn’t been at work today. No pallor to his skin or fever heat in the hug that would have indicated a Miasma; though Baze could certainly smell the vasodilatation paste his mother had no doubt slathered on his chest.

The anxiety sliver dug in deeper. “Are you alright, papa?” he asked carefully. He could feel his mother rolling her eyes from the kitchen but she never saw the point in coming _to_ the point obliquely.

“Oh, don’t _you_ start fussing,” his father snorted. “Your mother has enough fuss in her to last a lifetime.”

“If you wish to die riddled with Kyber shards, you need only say,” his mother replied to this icily.

Baze’s father remained ever unaffected by her cold disdain. “You know I love you, my sheathed blade,” his father called back, which was his usual method of reply if he angered her. Baze’s mother was a hyper-competent woman who was only ever stymied by genuine declarations of love.

“Is it glass lung?” Baze demanded. Glass lung was an early indicator of miners disease; the build up of Kyber dust built to dangerous levels in the body.

“It’s not that bad,” his father snorted, before his comm chimed. “Hold a moment, my boy. I want to hear every word of what you’ve been up to in a minute.” He turned to find his comm.

Baze turned to look at his mother who had come from the kitchen. He didn’t ask.

“We don’t know,” there was a twist in her mouth; she was extremely irked by something. When his mother was irked she broke bones.

“He hasn’t been to the clinic?” Baze was surprised.

“Closed,” was his mother’s blunt reply.

“Closed?” Baze repeated, bewildered. There was always a free clinic open to the miners. Always. He looked at the rage in his mother’s dark eyes; always banked, always ready to explode.

“The hospital is good enough,” she spoke lowly, quoting someone she held in contempt.

Baze frantically considered his options. The main hospital _was_ very good, but getting an appointment there without going through the emergency ward was a long process. If it was glass lung, days would matter.

Before he’d gotten as far as contacting Master Bran to see if there were strings she could pull, or Abbhat perhaps, if he were willing, his father came back in wearing his boots.

“You’re not going out,” Baze’s mother told her husband flatly.

 “Certainly not, if I had a choice,” Baze’s father spoke with care. “One of the main laser rigs has broken down; the shift supervisor is an absent minded idiot who didn’t put a repair request in with the droids so when the morning shift comes around it’s going to be about as much help as a toothbrush,” he paused to cough. Baze winced.

“You’re not going out,” his mother stated.

“We don’t finish the shaft on time we don’t get our bonuses,” Baze’s father sighed.

Baze felt his chest lurch; the hospital was expensive where the clinic had been free.

His mother simply raised an eyebrow. Baze knew that if they needed money then she could get all they needed and more. Baze’s father didn’t like her taking those kinds of jobs, though; they were dangerous and usually left scars. At this moment, though it looked as if his mother could care less about that.

They stared at each other, waging a silent war of wills.

“I’ll go,” Baze offered as a truce.

They both turned to him

He shrugged. “I’ve only been out a year; my pass should still be good.” Even if it wasn’t all the miners knew Baze; the one-time sandlark who was a chip of his father’s block with added ingenuity in fixing the mine machines. They’d hardly object to him going down.

His father opened his mouth.

“Toolbox is in the usual place,” his mother ruthlessly cut him off before striding back to the kitchen.

His father sighed ruefully. “Thank you, by boy.”

Baze nodded, throat too thickened for words.

Dead tired though he was, Baze’s march back to the mines was filled with nostalgia. He missed the place; well, miss was probably the wrong word. He’d never really wanted to be a miner. But it was wistfully familiar.

“Zabey!” the night guard called, and Baze rolled his eyes.

“No one calls me that anymore, Old Aunt,” he protested.

The old woman smirked at him from her security booth. She wasn’t Baze’s Aunt; or rather, she was everyone’s aunt. She’d worked in the mines seventy straight years now and her quotas had been legendary when she was down in the dark. Baze felt a glimmer of unease when he saw her fully in the light of the booth; ugly hackles marched down her bent back - spinal implants to draw Kyber dust out of the blood and protect the spinal cord and brain. Her wispy grey hair existed only as a fringe on her forehead. The rest was taken up with blinking, heavy skull cap of metal where needles every once in a while jabbed into her skull like oil pumps. The best you could say about the cyber rig was that it was clinical.

It was effective, it treated the miner’s disease; or at least slowed the effects down to a crawl. He tried not to imagine his father wearing such a painful device, looking like half of a machine.

Old Aunt sucked a breath of air from her ventilator mask. “Oh, stop looking so down. There’s no guarantee that your father’ll end up sharing a booth with me.”

Baze jerked in surprise.

Old Aunt cackled wheezily. “You’ve been amongst the _palaka_ too long, Zabey. We all know each other’s business ‘round here. Don’t go around borrowing trouble, young fool,” she sucked in another breath from the mask. “There’s usually enough of the real sort to go around. Ain’t they taught you that yet?”

“Yes, Old Aunt,” Baze replied dryly. “But I have a miner’s thick skull. Some lessons take time to penetrate.”

She laughed until she choked and had to take a few more puffs before she could speak again. “You’re father said you’d be by,” she rasped. “Got your kit?”

Baze wordlessly shook the heavy tool kit he carted on his back.

“Okay. I’ll add you to the system manually so the idiots up top don’t kick up a fuss. You’re a good boy, Zabey, doing this for him. Oh, and once you get down to the level, take a portalight and a snorkel. The internal fanworks aren’t running.”

“Maintenance?” he asked curiously as he signed the log book.

Old Aunt made a wheezy noise. “Nah. They turn ‘em off nights now. Yeah, quite a thing, eh?” she added to his shocked look. “Damned budget; they cut us right off at the knees when it came out.”

“ _That’s_ why the clinic closed?” Baze gaped. “Budget cuts? I thought it was Miasma outbreaks.”

Old Aunt shook her head. “Nah. No money for it, or so they said. They’ll pay a high price for it soon ‘nough though, won’t they? No night fan filtering means a huge dose of dust in the mornings. I doubt whether the bloody uppers will know what to do when their whole mining force goes down to glass lung. It ain’t like they’re going to pick up a shovel,” she gave a wheezy, bitter laugh.

Baze chewed on that when the lift took him down to the new shaft. This one was honeycombed properly and rigged with lights that were switched off; no doubt the budget cuts were responsible for that too. He strapped on a visor helmet and an airmask in the ready room and hooked it to the snorkel wired overhead to feed dust free air from the surface. He engaged the internal comm system so he could hear if any alarms when off and then trudged his way into the pitch black silence.

Shining the blue portalight, he could see why this shaft was so promising. Glittering stars of Kyber silver flecked the walls and ceilings and where you found Kyber silver you found Kyber crystals. Bonuses were good for seams this rich.

He found the broken down laser rig easily enough and almost groaned when he did. Papa hadn’t told him it was old Gerta that was to be fixed. Baze swore of all the machines he used to be sought after to fix, old Gerta was the worst. Old fashioned and temperamental, she rattled herself into machine apoplexy every chance she got, and that’s when her coding just didn’t up and delete itself because the Kyber dust had gotten in and done it's deadly resonance with the internal processors. Baze swore he’d taken her apart to her last bolt looking for the where it infiltrated, but to no avail.

Baze sighed in resignation; there would likely be no sleep to be had tonight. He drew out the diagnostic datapad and plugged in the hookup, mentally running down the hierarchy of repair. Diagnostics, then programming errors, then sensors, then fluids, oils and coolant, then intakes, then engine – starting with locomotive engine and then moving on to the laser generation engine.

Predictably for Gerta he got all the way to number nine on the list, muttering imprecations about rattling old junkers as he went through the painstaking process of checking the locomotion engine to see if Kyber dust had somehow made it through the filters in the intake. Of course this would be so much easier if some bantha wit had remembered to grease the studs on the engine casing at the last maintenance check. They came out with shrieks of protest that echoed up and down the chamber while Baze cursed them heartily. The Guardians and his mother had both taught him perseverance, but his father’s illness was weighing on his mind and it made him short tempered.

One stud refused to bend to his will and it was grating his last nerve. “Move, you kriffing piece of shit metal!” Baze roared. He kicked out with one durasteel capped boot into Gerta’s unmoved side. “Mother fucking cursed contraption! May the desert take you and stick you into the mouth of a sarlacc!”

“Would you kindly keep the noise down?” came a voice in the darkness.

Baze dropped his tool and spun. It was a measure of how far he’d coming in his training that he unthinkingly pressed himself against the shaft wall and crouched out of immediate sightline with the light off. “Who is this?” he demanded. The voice had come through the comm system; it had to. Between the noise of the snorkel and the visor helmet he wore, very little sound could reach his ears the normal way.

“The voice of your manners. We don’t talk much these days,” came the irritated reply.

“If that was your idea of wit, your humour needs a thorough retuning,” Baze retorted, annoyed to have been so surprised. “Maybe a complete overhaul.”

The reply was swift and snippy “Would it be at all possible to have it done during daylight hours? That seems like the polite option.”

“What are you? A protocol droid?” Baze challenged.

“I almost wish it were so; they do not require sleep,” the voice parried sarcastically. “Gracelings, however, _do_ need their sleep and that is a rather difficult proposition when faced with foul mouthed ghosts wandering the mines in the middle of the night near to a comm line.”

Baze snorted a breath of laughter. “Ghosts? Ha! No such thing. No one down here but miners and sandlarks.”

“And you are a miner?” the question was arch.

“Not anymore.”

“A sandlark then,” the voice scoffed, then added “One, whom I might add, makes an awful racket when people are trying – and I have stressed this earlier – to _sleep_.”

“Well, the solution to that – just work with me here – would be to maybe, I don’t know, turn off the mike on your end of the comm line?” Baze replied with sarcastic patience. “After all, it’s not like I can do that on my end. Safety, you know.”

The voice sighed, exasperated. “I can’t do it on _mine_ either. They’ve reassigned my cell to the one next to the main comm room. They never switch off the mikes here, in case the alarms go off. Safety, you know.”

Huh. Baze hadn’t known the intracomm system was still active all the way to the Temple. “Who the hell did you piss off to land mine watchtower duty?”

“I might ask the same of you getting the midnight shift in a mine closed at sunset, sandlark,” the voice appeared to be climbing out of his snit.

“No pissing,” Baze retorted, then sighed. “My father is ill tonight. I offered to come down and do some work for him so he wouldn’t be behind tomorrow.”

“Oh,” the voice sounded surprised for an instant. “That’s very kind of you,” it offered.

“Don’t sound so surprised, graceling,” Baze kept his voice level, but the surprise in that voice made him bristle for the implied low opinion of the _yahvasudra_. “We might not be blessed in the Force or whatever, but we are sometimes capable of looking out for each other,” he added snidely.

The voice appeared to hesitate before saying. “Your father... does he have the glass lung?”

Surprised, Baze hesitated before replying “... Maybe. We don’t know yet.”

Another, longer silence, before the voice spoke again. “There’s a scientist who arrived in the Chan’An Hospital three weeks ago. Pelen Illute is his name. He’s developed a method for removing Kyber dust from the lungs. It’s still experimental, but it’s working on late stage sufferers very well. He’s looking to try it on some early stage volunteers, to see if he can clear it completely, but most mistake it for Miasma in the early stage and don’t go to the hospitals. Abb...the senior clergy has forbidden him to talk to the miners because they said it will upset them to have an outsider telling them they’re sick. Illute would jump at the chance to test it on an early stage sufferer if one should happen to report to Chan’An.”

Baze drew in a breath, shocked to his centre. Chan’An wasn’t really in their district, the miners wouldn’t use it. “Really? That’s... thank you. I shall take him there. Just... thank you.”

“Don’t sound so surprised, sandlark,” the voice replied dryly. “Occasionally we Force-whatever blessed are capable of the compassion we preach.”

Baze laughed, “How do you know about the treatment? It doesn’t sound like common knowledge, the way you tell it,” Baze frowned. “Do you... have the glass lung?” But if he lived in the Temple proper, that would make him _rishisudra_ , wouldn’t it?

“No,” the voice denied. “But I do listen a lot. People tell me things. No doubt the Force has willed me into the comm room for that very reason.”

“Well, whatever the reason, I am grateful for you, graceling,” Baze told him solemnly.

“You’re welcome, sandlark,” the voice sounded like it was smiling. “I live to be of use to those that need help.”

“Me too,” Baze replied. “Sorry for waking you.”

“The Force moves in mysterious and oft times inconvenient ways, but there is ever a purpose. I need to thanks, or apologies for doing as it wills. And on the bright side, I know so many new curse words now,” the voice offered dryly.

Baze laughed again. “Always happy to be of service. I’ll try to be quieter.”

“No need; I’ve probably become immune to the noise by now. May the Force be with you, sandlark.”

Baze looked over old Gerta. “I’ll probably need it. Goodnight graceling.”

\----------------------------------------------------------


End file.
